Royal officials of the Indies found the contraband trade one of the most critical and debilitating problems in their administration of Spanish America. Contraband existed throughout the colonial period, despite occasional strenuous efforts to stamp it out. Various ideas have been advanced to explain the failure of Spanish counter-contraband in America, and these largely reflect on the quality of Spanish administration of the Indies. The implication is that governors and royal officials were generally guilty of corruption, of passive or active connivance in the contraband trade, or, at the very least, of incompetence or inefficiency in preventing it.

Padre António Vieira commenting on the colonial government of Brazil to the Crown in 1654.

On the Tagus River approximately eight kilometers from the center of Lisbon stands a monument to Portuguese overseas exploration and expansion—O Padrão dos descobrimentos — erected in 1960 on the 500th anniversary of Prince Henry the Navigator. Facing the Tagus is Prince Henry. Flanking him on each side and representing the reasons behind the success of Portuguese exploration and expansion are several symbolic figures. King Manuel, during whose reign many of the discoveries were made, illustrates the complete support of the Crown that many of the expeditions enjoyed. A priest carrying a cross depicts the religious motives behind expansion—the spreading of Christianity to the heathen. There are also a caulker and a carpenter both important in the production of new sailing vessels. A pilot with an astrolabe portrays the significance of the scientific aspects of overseas exploration. Luís de Camões holds his Os Lusiadas, the epic poem that depicted the triumphs of Portuguese expansion. There are even widows in tears to remind viewers of the great loss of men that Portugal suffered during her conquests. Another important figure depicted on the monument is the conquistador with drawn sword, the symbol of the military—“the backbone of the empire.”

The Spanish political crisis of 1808 and the subsequent convening of the Cortes at Cádiz two years later helped crystallize certain political and philosophical concepts held by a number of “enlightened ”persons on both sides of the Atlantic. Their inherent faith in reason and progress made these delegates at Cádiz turn to a new instrument of government with confidence. In the end, however, strong vested interests thwarted the work of this liberal Cortes. This study examines the struggles, frustrations, triumphs, and failures of one influential and outspoken American in the Cortes at Cádiz, José Mejía Lequerica (1775-1813), who brought many ideas of the Enlightenment and of the French Constitution of 1791 to the new Spanish Constitution.

In 1891, Luther H. Gulik, a prominent member of the international leadership of the YMCA of the United States, established the triangle as the YMCA symbol. He saw the triangle as a symbol imbued with Christian beliefs that would become the spearhead of a worldwide missionary movement. About the Triangle, Gulik wrote:

Although several Colombians of varying prominence had suggested the possibility of an imminent Isthmian revolt, it seems that the events of and immediately after November 3, 1903, took most of their countrymen by surprise. Certainly there is no evidence of significant prior planning for such a contingency. The achievement of Panamanian independence was followed, in turn, by a Colombian failure to establish a consistent and coherent policy designed either to regain the lost province or to implement terms by which the loss could be made more acceptable. This is not to say that Colombians, officially and unofficially, did nothing in response to the Panamanian separatist movement. Yet what is impressive is not what happened, but what did not happen: There was no sustained military movement against the Isthmus, no break in diplomatic relations with the United States, no serious reprisals against Americans and Isthmians, or their property, in Colombia, and no vigorous protest against the incumbent Colombian political leadership. Panama was apparently not a major issue even during the Presidential campaign and election of 1904. The lack of preparation alluded to above was surely a factor in determining this limited response, but it was a small factor and offers, at best, an incomplete explanation. In fact, the mildness of the Colombian reaction was the product of the unique interaction of domestic and international, contemporary and historical conditions which this article seeks to illuminate.

The reputation of Fr. Agustín de Vetancurt, one of the better known Franciscans of colonial Mexico, derives largely from his fame as a historian. He is the author of the monumental Teatro mexicano (1698), a historical description of the most important events of colonial New Spain. Fr. Agustín was also an accomplished scholar of Nahuatl, and published several works in that language. This essay will take a preliminary look at his life and times by focusing on a small work written by him in Nahuatl. It is a guide for the ceremony of the Stations of the Cross, celebrated throughout the year but especially on Good Friday.

“These days, we want to know everything and forget nothing. Life needs to confess to itself and take a test of conscience. Let's grab life by the neck so that it makes that confession in the elegantly eloquent form of numbers, tables, formulas, and diagrams. This is statistics: the confession that we make life make. One must never forget what Goethe said: my works are merely part of a great confession. We make of statistics the schematic, numerical confession of life. Life should confess to itself.”

The great economic and political changes in the Río de la Plata of the late 1700s penetrated not only Buenos Aires and the interior of present-day Argentina, but upriver the hitherto neglected province of Paraguay shared the reforms of the Intendant system and economic liberalization. Those changes, along with the expulsion of the Jesuits, produced a shift in the economy of this region from the Paraná-Tebicuary area to the northern frontier of that province. The impelling economic motive for that shift was the north's greater ability to meet the demand for Paraguay's primary export, yerba mate. By the 1780s, northern Paraguay experienced a greater exploitation of yerbales, both to the benefit of independent entrepreneurs and government revenues.

Arguably the line “Broken Spears” is the most famous in Nahuatl. Any undergraduate student who has taken a course in Latin American history, literature, or anthropology has in all likelihood come across the line. It, of course, comes from the title of Miguel Leon-Portilla's book of the same name. The line appears in a description of Tlatelolco following the destruction of the city by the Spanish in the conquest of Mexico:

Broken spears lie in the roads
We have torn our hair in our grief
The houses are roofless now, and their walls
Are red with blood.

This evocative image has dominated much of the imagination of two generations of college students.

To the dismay of today's social progressives, the Argentine Catholic church addresses the moral situation of its people but also shies away from specific political positions or other hint of secular involvement. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the church set out to secure its place in national leadership by strengthening religious institutions and withdrawing clergy from politics. The church struggled to overcome a heritage of organizational weakness in order to promote evangelization, that is, to extend its spiritual influence within Argentina. The bishop of the central city of Córdoba, Franciscan Friar Zenón Bustos y Ferreyra (1905-1925), reinforced pastoral care, catechesis, and education. After 1912, as politics became more heated, Bustos insisted that priests abstain from partisan activities and dedicate themselves to ministry. The church casts itself in the role of national guardian, not of the government, but of the faith and morals of the people.

Heir to Greek and Roman culture, the revelations of Holy Scripture and the great commentaries upon it written by Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and lesser theologians and philosophers of the Middle Ages, the cultured European of the fifteenth century was content that the corpus of his knowledge was complete, and that within it was all that was necessary for a full understanding of the universe. Nevertheless, this satisfaction was greatly upset by the explorations of Christopher Columbus and his followers during the final decade of the century. The European discovery of extensive lands populated with theretofore unknown peoples, with a flora and fauna totally distinct from that of Europe, was, in all senses, a New World. In that this New World had not been incorporated into the extensive and well-defined knowledge of Western civilization, it was, therefore, open to any and all concepts conceivable to the imagination; everything was possible, even the very improbable.

Art work throughout almost the entire history of the Church has been primarily didactic. Man was taught through the arts of sculpture, painting, mosaic, and stained glass, all that he should know of the creation of the world, the dogmas of religion, the virtues, the hero-saints, and during the middle ages especially, the range of the sciences, the arts and crafts. Thus, in the latter half of the eighteenth century when the Franciscans came to the remote outposts in California, they brought with them the pictures and statues by which the simple and ignorant Indian might learn, through his eyes, much of what he was to know of his new faith. “Through the medium of art the highest conceptions of theologian and scholar penetrated to some extent the minds of even the humblest of the people.”

As trade between Spain and her American colonies declined in the seventeenth century, interprovincial commerce increased. This change within the Spanish Empire and some of its multiple implications have only recently been recognized and given scholarly attention. Consequently, little information is available on the part colonial municipal governments played in the imperial economic realignment. A case in point is the role of the Santiago cabildo in regard to the export trade which tied Chile's Central Valley, the region administered by that city council, to the Peruvian market economy. Although various studies provide supportive data on this subject, a close scrutiny of the council minutes, focused on policies that regulated outbound commerce and the production from which it flowed, can more clearly delineate the extent of creole initiative and cabildo participation in policy formulation and enforcement. A correlative theme pursued through this appraisal of the records concerns the socio-economic attitudes of the upper levels of society in the last century of Hapsburg rule.

WITH the death of Herbert E. Bolton in December, 1953, we close the circle of an important epoch in inter-American cultural relations. We come to the end of a period that, in the United States, had its beginning about the middle of the 1890’s and which eventually culminated with the Good Neighbor Policy and the close collaboration of the American nations during the Second World War.